Oct 25, 2026 · 21 min · 9 segments
João Falcão Serra leads industry and finance research at the European Space Policy Institute in Vienna. He explains how he tracks global investment in space companies and why European private funding…
I'm a lead on industry and finance at the European Space Policy Institute.
The European Space Policy Institute is a think tank for space, and it is the think tank for space in Europe.
Working as a non-profit, we promote European space policy on an international level.
We also provide analysis and proposals to the European decision makers and institutions.
We raise public awareness and this is also why I'm here with you today, Matt.
Our founding members were the European Space Agency and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency, FFG.
But our membership actually stretches through national space agencies, the European Commission, but also to the industry.
I, in particular, am in charge of the research line on industry and finance.
And this means that we have a couple of important projects, let's say, let's put it that way.
so one of them uh which is how i guess you found me matt was exactly on the space venture which is an yearly report where we track investment into uh global um globally into space startups and scale-ups But we also have many other projects such as we did a pretty important report last year, Blinded by the Light, which is looking at how the European space industry has been faring as of late and maybe what are the challenges and what we can do about them.
We also did one report, for instance, on alternative finance mechanisms for the European space sector.
So we work with our members also to see what is the demand of research and what are the needs and evidence that they need.
How do you track the investment to populate your dashboard? Because a lot of this is not particularly public, is it? How do you track it all down?
Yeah, actually, there's a lot of public information and most of the information there is public.
It's just that it is in many different places and it is sometimes confusing and you have to kind of validate.
The problem is that what they do is they web scrape the internet they basically collect all the data and of course they do their own due diligence but because they are collecting data for everything not just space of course it is not as precise as we would like to have for space in particular and this means that With those sources, plus we also track by ourselves a lot of press releases from the companies.
You know, we have information coming from investors and we put everything together.
I'm a lead on industry and finance at the European Space Policy Institute.
The European Space Policy Institute is a think tank for space, and it is the think tank for space in Europe.
Working as a non-profit, we promote European space policy on an international level.
We also provide analysis and proposals to the European decision makers and institutions.
We raise public awareness and this is also why I'm here with you today, Matt.
Our founding members were the European Space Agency and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency, FFG.
But our membership actually stretches through national space agencies, the European Commission, but also to the industry.
I, in particular, am in charge of the research line on industry and finance.
And this means that we have a couple of important projects, let's say, let's put it that way.
so one of them uh which is how i guess you found me matt was exactly on the space venture which is an yearly report where we track investment into uh global um globally into space startups and scale-ups But we also have many other projects such as we did a pretty important report last year, Blinded by the Light, which is looking at how the European space industry has been faring as of late and maybe what are the challenges and what we can do about them.
We also did one report, for instance, on alternative finance mechanisms for the European space sector.
So we work with our members also to see what is the demand of research and what are the needs and evidence that they need.
How do you track the investment to populate your dashboard? Because a lot of this is not particularly public, is it? How do you track it all down?
Yeah, actually, there's a lot of public information and most of the information there is public.
It's just that it is in many different places and it is sometimes confusing and you have to kind of validate.
The problem is that what they do is they web scrape the internet they basically collect all the data and of course they do their own due diligence but because they are collecting data for everything not just space of course it is not as precise as we would like to have for space in particular and this means that With those sources, plus we also track by ourselves a lot of press releases from the companies.
You know, we have information coming from investors and we put everything together.
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